by Rees, Paul
Yet it was enough to reunite Plant with Page and Jones, the three of them promoting the film at screenings in New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo that October. A couple of months later they were together again. This time it was in formal evening attire to receive the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC, from President Barack Obama in recognition of their contribution to American culture and the arts. In his introductory speech Obama thanked the three of them for behaving themselves, noting their history of “hotel rooms being trashed and mayhem all around them.”
That night’s tribute concert to Zeppelin featured performances from Foo Fighters, Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz, with Plant, Page and Jones looking on. The highlight of this was an extraordinary version of “Stairway to Heaven” by Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart. Backed by Jason Bonham on drums and, as the song unfolded, also by a gospel choir and a string section, the Wilson sisters reclaimed Zeppelin’s most familiar tune as a grand epic. At its end Plant was caught on camera, apparently wiping a tear from his eye.
During the London press conference to announce Celebration Day Plant had been testy but in all other aspects he appeared at ease with this popping back to his past. Latterly, he had seemed more reconciled with it, happy enough to revisit that time so long as he was not expected to stay there. And happier still to be able to keep people guessing.
“The great thing is Robert can do anything now,” says Bill Flanagan from VH1, who had got to know Plant well. “What will he do next? It could be that he’s going to wet his finger, put it up in the air and say, ‘You know, there’s a nice breeze blowing in from Africa, I guess I’ll head off that way.’ Or then, he might think it’d be kind of fun to get up and sing ‘Black Dog’ again.”
“I did a shoot with the three of them in New York on the afternoon of the Celebration Day premiere,” recalls photographer Ross Halfin. “The weirdest thing was when they were walking out of the hotel at the end of that, Robert turned to Jimmy and said, ‘We really should do something together.’ Jimmy sort of dismissed it afterward, saying he didn’t mean it. But you never know with them.”
It has been more than thirty years since Zeppelin broke up but an awful lot of people still cling to the hope that they will return, most never having got to see them the first time around. But then, of course they do. In all that grainy concert footage, on the records and through the acres of print devoted to telling the glorious and gory details of their story, Zeppelin seem immeasurably bigger and better than the countless groups that have since taken their place. No matter that they are that much older now, or that one of their number is missing—even the suggestion of what Zeppelin once was would do.
This much has been—and very likely will be—unchanging. So too, however, Plant’s resolve not to give himself up to it again, hardened through the years by the successes he has had on his own. The older he gets the more this appears to be the one thing about which he is intransigent. In all other aspects of his career Plant seems forever open to change and having different experiences. To press on, as if standing still might be the death of him, forward motion being his benediction.
Toward the end of 2013 Plant parted company with his long-serving manager Bill Curbishley, replacing him with his personal assistant Nicola Powell. Although he did not give a reason, it was suggested to me by people who know both men that Plant felt that Curbishley had been too willing to push him back toward Zeppelin. Indeed, Curbishley had instigated his reunion with Page in the 1990s and he appears to have been more enthusiastic than Plant about the group coming back together to promote the Celebration Day film.
Plant’s friend, the folk singer Roy Harper, refers to him as “Robust Planet.” “Robert was very wise not to carry on into a dusty, web-strewn grave,” Harper insists. “It’s not something he can recapture and all those things are not as emblematic to him as they would have been in his youth. It’s a very different life that he’s living now.”
In the summer of 2012 Plant formed another new band, calling it the Sensational Shape Shifters. The core of this was the same as that of his previous group, Strange Sensation. Drummer Clive Deamer having joined Radiohead in the interim, Plant brought in Dave Smith, who had been playing North and West African music for years, and added the Gambian musician Juldeh Camara to the lineup.
He debuted the band at shows in the U.K. and the U.S. that July and August, his partner Patty Griffin joining them for some dates. They toured Central and South America in the autumn, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand through the spring of 2013, and the U.S. again the following summer. This particular collective is like a hybrid of all the music Plant has fixated on, repurposing Zeppelin songs and old blues and folk standards, mixing in the Americana influences of his most recent records and also the very differing sounds of North Africa and ’60s psychedelic rock.
Although there were no original songs in their sets their feel was fresh and unpredictable, the heat of reinvention warming them. Plant delighted most of all in overhauling the Zeppelin canon. In these hands “Black Dog” became a desert blues, “Heartbreaker” like a ’90s techno track and “Gallows Pole” music for a whirling dervish.
For the first time in nearly a decade Plant has also been writing songs, and with different people again. During the last couple of years he has worked up a bunch of material with guitarist Buddy Miller and another of his last Band of Joy musicians, drummer Marco Giovino.
“I’m in touch with Robert a lot, and six months after the Band of Joy tour ended we began trading ideas back and forth,” says Giovino. “Not long ago we met up at Buddy’s house here in Nashville. I’d sent Robert some drum loops that I’d made up at home and he’d been jotting down ideas to go with them.
“It’s definitely different to the Band of Joy record, rockier and with more of an edge to it. I was witness to a lot of what Robert’s writing about while we were on the road because he’s talked about his relationship with Patty on a couple of the songs.”
Added to this Plant and Patty Griffin have been writing together. One of the tracks resulting from this, “Highway Song,” appeared on Griffin’s excellent American Kid album of May 2013 and Plant sang on another, “Ohio.” Both songs are bare, gentle and graceful, with Plant’s voice whispering through them like the wind. “We each have similar places we come from as singers,” Griffin told Billboard at the time of its release. “He inspires me. He goes far and deep.”
Plant has taken the Sensational Shape Shifters into the studio, too. He intends releasing a new album in 2014. The measure both of how far it is that he ranges and how freely he roams is that he could make this record with this band, or with the Band of Joy or Patty Griffin, or with someone or something else. Likewise, there are no boundaries to its musical remit; it could just as easily head for the Appalachians or the Sahara again as another place entirely.
Fifty years since he first started singing and performing in bands Plant still so obviously gets off on music, and he continues to cast around for different ways of experiencing it. These other ongoing projects aside, in the last year or so he has also sung with the Texas-based folk singer Amy Cook on a track titled “It’s Gonna Rain” on her Summer Skin album, and on the British rock band Primal Scream’s most recent record, More Light.
“This is what knocks me out. There are a just a handful of people that have had the experience and accomplishment that Robert Plant has had,” says Flanagan. “There’s thirty, forty, at tops fifty of them in the world in that pantheon. First of all, most of them are smart because you don’t survive if you’re not. The dumb ones have either died or gone bankrupt. But usually, the passionate love of music that got them there in the first place has cooled.
“Success sidetracks people in a lot of different ways, not all of them bad. It’s not just that they get greedy and have to support their six mansions and their private planes, running off with groupies and getting divorced. People also get pulled from music by doing charity work, making movies, writing books and collecting art. You v
ery, very rarely meet someone like Plant, who is still just as fanatical about music after forty years at the top. That’s almost unprecedented.”
Robert Plant turned 65 in August 2013. In his home country he is now eligible for a bus pass and a state pension. In many respects he seems both settled and content. He and Patty Griffin divide their time between his homes in England and Wales and Austin, Texas, where Plant rents what he described in an interview with the Independent’s Tim Cumming as an “an old crack house.”
In Texas Plant and Griffin are regular faces at Austin’s many fine blues and country music venues. Back in the Midlands the two of them are just as likely to be seen together in Plant’s village pub or of a morning in the local coffee shop. Plant’s friend and neighbor there, Kevyn Gammond, recalls spending Christmas 2013 with the pair of them. He and Plant bought each other the same gift, a box set of 1950s films featuring the British comic actor Leslie Phillips.
“Phillips is one of Robert’s great heroes,” Gammond reveals. “At one time he used to check into hotels under Phillips’s name, and Robert had got him to sign my collection for me. We were sat there, exchanging these presents and enthusing about Leslie Phillips, and Robert looked at me and said, ‘So, it’s come to this.’ ”
And yet, however grounded Plant has appeared to remain, however everyday his foibles, his is not a normal life, at least not in the sense the rest of us would define normal. He has been a rock star since he was nineteen years old, feted and fawned over for all of his adult years. As recently as May 2013 he was forced to take out a restraining order against a female fan, Alysson Billings, who he said was obsessive and allegedly believed she was having a relationship with him. The website TMZ.com reported that in court papers, Plant had alleged that Billings had bombarded him for three years with gifts and messages, her entreaties taking on a darker turn when he began dating Patty Griffin. “Your betrayal with another woman still stabs my mind,” she is said to have written him. “She’s got you so pussy-whipped and henpecked, it makes me want to puke.”
Then again, he has seen and tasted more than most people ever do, although none of this has inured him from the dreadful pain of loss. That ache and those memories are anchored to the very depths of his soul. Perhaps it has been this that has kept him going on, heading for the light of the new and in doing so keeping out of the shadows.
He admitted as much when speaking to Mat Snow of Mojo magazine in 1994. “I’ve lost too many people around me to even see any empty spaces,” he said. “I know there’s emptiness in my heart but I fill up the places.”
The journey he has followed through music has been remarkable, and not just for the heights he has gone to with Zeppelin or the fact of him standing tall on his own. It is more that he is still curious, still questing, still wanting to be challenged and surprised. This, at a time when almost all of his peers have accepted their lot, stopped asking or reaching for more, nothing left to do but wait for their dotage.
Looking for parallels one could point to Johnny Cash, who managed such a great late run in the company of producer Rick Rubin, or Bob Dylan, even now able to touch greatness, or Leonard Cohen and Neil Young, this despite their best work being long gone. Each of them now keeps to their own furrow, however, and in this respect Plant is unique. For him there have been no self-imposed barriers.
Not everything he has done has worked. Since Zeppelin there has perhaps been just a small percentage of it that would qualify as great. But most often he has been good and better, and one could not once have called his next move with any degree of certainty.
“I’m just so excited about what I do,” he told me a couple of years ago. “I look after it like a baby child, as Robert Johnson would say. I’m a very lucky guy. For the contacts I have—a thousand pen pals, some of who speak Tamasheq and live south of the Sahara.
“My whole deal is that I can’t do anything alone. I can’t consider doing a thing without going out and press-ganging bright souls and spirits. That’s what I look for, some kind of radiance and an innocent kindness. I know that sounds fucking hippy, but there’s not a thing I can go near that doesn’t have that equation.
“I can’t say that I’m fortunate in that respect, because I put a lot into it, but my rewards aren’t the gongs, the lifetime achievements and all that . . . stuff. It’s more that, with the insatiable love of music and the weaponry I have, the repertoire I can go in to now is phenomenal.”
He paused then to consider how fast time passes, his mind shooting off at another tangent as it tends to do. He recalled a former girlfriend, five years past, and how she had urged him to commit to a certain future. “She wanted to hear the sound of a pushchair, I think,” he said. “So I promised her a trip to the seaside instead.”
Plant said he took this unfortunate girl to Cleethorpes, a windswept town on the English east coast, and then on a chill afternoon to see a football match. “We went to a good fish and chip shop, too,” he protested. “Then we split up. Well, I ran off with Miss Lapland. I’m seeing her again next week, actually. Lovely girl.”
In the telling of this there was a wicked glint in his pale blue eyes, those eyes that have seen so much. Later I wrote to him asking how he would feel about looking back over the full span of his life and giving it his own perspective.
His reply ran to a single line. He said: “Thank you for asking, but I think it’s too early in my career for me to be doing that—there’s so much more to come.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the help and guidance of many good souls. I am well aware that most sane folk consider a long list of names to be as enticing as root-canal work but it would be very much remiss of me not to recognize their significant contributions.
I must first thank Robert Plant for past interviews and, although he did not authorize it, for allowing me to go where I did during the months of researching this book.
A big tip of the hat to my incomparable agent Matthew Hamilton at Aitken Alexander Associates for services above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks, too, to my man in New York, Matthew Elblonk at DeFiore and Company. I owe much to Natalie Jerome at HarperCollins in London on account of her wise urgings and promptings, and for the same to Denise Oswald at HarperCollins in New York. Thanks, too, to Simon Gerratt and Mark Bolland, my editor par excellence, and to all those at HarperCollins who have worked on this project.
My wife Denise Jeffrey did a sterling research job. I am also indebted to the following: Nicola Powell, Barbara “BC” Cherone, Bernard MacMahon, Steve Morris, Neil Storey, Trudie Myerscough-Harris, Frances McMahon, Paul Brannigan, Mark Blake, Max Lousada, Dave Ling, Simon Raymonde, William Rice, Sue Sillitoe, John Woodhouse, Paul Berry at Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, Julie Wilde at King Edward VI College in Stourbridge, Dave Brolan, and to Paul Toms for IT salvation.
I would have been lost without all of those who were gracious enough to allow me to interview them for this book—and not just for their time and insights, but often as not for many other kindnesses, too. Thank you: Jim Lea, Dave Hill, Ross Halfin, Kim Fowley, Anton Brookes, Richard Cole, Bill Flanagan, Glenn Hughes, Bill Bonham, Nigel Eaton, Doug Boyle, Andrew Hewkin, Marco Giovino, Hossam Ramzy, Steve Gorman, Mike Kellie, Steve Bull, Mark Stanway, Christopher Selby, John Crutchley, Bob Harris, Jody Craddock, Michael Des Barres, Carole Williams, Dave Pegg, Roy Harper, Laurie Hornsby, Tony Billingham, Phill Brown, Mike Davies, Andy Edwards, Bev Pegg, Perry Foster, Dennis Sheehan, Chris Hughes, Michael Richards, Tim Palmer, Benji LeFevre, Roy Williams, Colin Roberts, Mark “Spike” Stent, Trevor Burton, Jezz Woodroffe, John Ogden, Najma Akhtar, Chris Blackwell, Kevyn Gammond, Gary Tolley, John Dudley, Stan Webb, David “Rowdy” Yeats and Dave Lewis.
I have also been fortunate enough to interview Jimmy Page on two previous occasions and thank him for that now.
I am likewise grateful to all the writers, journalists and photographers whose work has informed and illustrated this work.
Whatever is good
in this book is thanks to all of the above. Any faults or inaccuracies are mine.
I was first inspired to write by the encouragement and patience of good teachers—Mrs. Godby, Mr. Bowler, Mrs. Jeavons, Mrs. Hinton, Mrs. Wymer and Geoff Sutton. And most of all by my mum and dad, who have never not supported me and who have always pointed me in the right direction.
Thanks and much love also to Mark and ’Tashi Rees-Martinez, to “Uncle” Michael Rees for his great generosity and invaluable help, and to all the members of the Rees and Jeffrey clans.
I consider myself hugely lucky to have been able to earn my living writing—and pontificating—about music for two-decades-and-counting now. I would not have been able to do so had I not come into contact with Steve Morris, Phil Alexander, Dave Henderson or Malcolm Dome. I am profoundly grateful to each of them. I also gained nothing but good from working alongside Marcus Rich, Jason Arnopp, Caroline Fish, Scarlet Borg, Dave Everley, Lucy Williams, Jo Kendall, Stuart Williams, Gareth Grundy, Matt Mason, Simon McEwen, Steve Peck, Russ O’Connell, Ian Stevens, Matt Yates, Ashlea Mackin, Mark Taylor, Warren Jackson and all the other fine folk who inspired and tolerated me through many very happy years at Kerrang! and Q magazines.
This book was written to the music of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, Fairport Convention, Van Morrison, the Band, the Byrds, Love, Alison Krauss, Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch. The pleasure was all mine.
SOURCES
BOOKS
Alan Clayson, The Origin of the Species: Led Zeppelin—How, Why and Where It All Began, Chrome Dreams.
Charles R. Cross, Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls, Aurum.
Neil Daniels, Robert Plant: Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page & the Solo Years, Independent Music Press.